#Rocket #Soyuz #OneWeb
Arianespace is launching 34 OneWeb internet communication satellites on a Soyuz 2.1b rocket. The OneWeb 9 satellites will go to a 1,200 km polar orbit, and will lift off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kazakhstan. OneWeb 9 will boost the number of OneWeb satellites launched to 288.
Despite Soyuz being a Russian rocket, the launch provider is still Arianespace. Ariane subcontracts ROSCOSMOS to launch a Soyuz on their behalf.
OneWeb is a planned satellite internet constellation with the goal of providing internet coverage to the entire globe. Similar to SpaceX’s Starlink, the OneWeb constellation aims to deliver semilow-latency internet to locations where ground-based internet is unreliable or unavailable.
OneWeb plans to have 648 satellites in their constellation, providing them with the 600 satellites needed for global coverage and an additional 48 on-orbit spares in case a satellite fails. These satellites are in a 1,200 km low-Earth polar orbit, which is significantly lower than the global internet services available today. The current satellite internet solutions orbit 35,786 km above the Earth, in geostationary orbit. However, the orbit of OneWeb’s satellites is still significantly higher than the 550 km orbit that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are in. OneWeb is expecting the final 648 satellite constellation to provide download speeds of roughly 50 Mb/s.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbnjrJdNWWY